Attempted kidnapping steals community's innocence, steels parents' resolve
Parents file in, desperate for answers, or at least a sense of control.
Much of the Sparrows Point subdivision is at the East Simpsonville Fire Station, a stone's throw from their neighborhood, which just a little more than a week ago seemed the safest place on earth to live.
Greenville County Sheriff's Sgt. B.R. Donnelly is teaching the kids about "stranger danger."
"What can a stranger do to you?"
The children fidget and giggle with their friends, then a precocious voice rises above the chatter.
"A stranger could take you to someone's house you don't want to be at and kill you," the little one says matter-of-factly.
The kids are told not to just kick the shin bone, but scrape down it. If you get caught in a kidnapper's grip, the deputy says, focus on the weakness of the attacker's thumbs to escape.
Donnelly asks another question: "Are all strangers bad?"
The kids drone in unison: "Yeesss." Then, a confused mix of "yes" and "no."
They don't know for sure. No one does. But since Sept. 6, parents and children in the neighborhood of young families know a new, very real fear: A little girl in their community was almost snatched.
And much like Sept. 11 put Americans into a new state of unease, Sparrows Point residents find the incident has put them in a place they never would have imagined, both physically and psychologically.
Parents are shocked, angry. They quickly organized this gathering in an attempt to reclaim some normalcy and a sense of comfort.
Street names in the neighborhood would hint at comfort: Valhalla Lane, the heavenly; Ashridge Way, the bucolic.
Desirable neighborhoods on the Eastside with ways and lanes and drives aren't supposed to have strangers lurking for the opportunity to grab children at play.
But it was at Valhalla and Ashridge, in the absolute heart of the community and just yards from the pool, where two men in a car grabbed a 6-year-old girl as she rode her bike in the dimming light of dusk on a Friday evening.
Searching for a cat
She was helping a group of girls search for a lost cat.
Her 10-year-old friend, a small child with a cast on her arm from surgery, helped the younger girl fight off the would-be kidnappers. The men fled, and police say they are still at large.
In that instant, the bubble burst for Sparrows Point and the communities around it.
"My first thought was, 'We need to get out of here,'" says Dawn Arquette, a mother of three who moved to Sparrows Point two years ago from Los Angeles County. Her family's home is only a block away from the attempted kidnapping site.
"We know that that's reality, as it happens everywhere," she says. "But when it happens in your neighborhood to someone you know, it's very scary. This stuff really happens."
Debbie Chapman's family moved from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., seven years ago to get away from crime. At the time, her now 10-year-old daughter was only 2, and she wanted her to grow up in a safe environment.
Chapman lives in Gilder Creek Farm, not far from Sparrows Point.
The mother of two says now she won't let her kids play baseball in the street like she used to do when she was young.
And, since the abduction attempt, she says parents will no longer let their children play outside between services at nearby Emmanuel Lutheran Church.
"They can't do what I used to," Chapman says. "It changes everybody's way of life."
How could this happen here?
Sparrows Point is one of those places — more common with each clearing of pasture land — where the nearly 400 houses are so close together that a seeming wall of double-garage doors lines the streets, just steps from the road.
Windows facing the street make it feel that a hundred eyes are watching. Each yard-of-the-month sign seems to scream that this place is normal and innocent.
Child abductions happen in California or Utah or Oregon, as everyone saw on television and in the papers this past summer, not in Greenville County.
Certainly not in a quiet neighborhood like this.
Greenville hasn't had a case like this in the past 15 years, says Sgt. James McCann, a spokesman for the Greenville County's Sheriff's Office.
But as the incident proves, it could happen anywhere, to anybody, McCann says. And anyone could be a predator.
The perpetrators are described as a white man with gray hair in his 50s, wearing a gray shirt and black and red hat, and a black man in his 30s, about 5-foot-6, 200 pounds, and wearing a blue and green Hawaiian shirt.
They never said a word.
They drove an older model white, box-type car with rust spots. A day before the attempted abduction, a neighbor reported that she saw the two men walking around the community as if they were selling something, McCann says.
There's no way to know for sure whether the two men have been seen in other communities, because the description is so general, he says.
But Brian Kelly is convinced they will strike again.
"Every other neighborhood is wide open right now," says Kelly, head of the Sparrows Point Neighborhood Crime Watch. "I'm afraid it's going to take them doing it again to somebody else … to stop them."
Since the abduction attempt, Kelly says he's constantly fielding calls about white cars and license numbers. He relays the information to authorities, but how many white cars with rust spots are there?
The fact that two men were together is not necessarily odd in an abduction case, McCann says. "There's no way to profile an abductor," he says.
And while history has shown that anyone can kidnap a child, statistics paint a general picture. Most children are abducted by a friend, acquaintance or family member.
In the worst-case stranger abductions, when the child is killed, almost all perpetrators are male, under age 35; and 85 percent are unmarried and are unemployed, according to a U.S. Justice Department report.
Two-thirds of stranger abductions are sex related.
Overall, abduction cases are down over the past decade, the FBI says.
Last year, the FBI listed 28,765 people — adults and children — as missing under involuntary circumstances, such as abduction.
That number is down 8.8 percent from 2000.
On average, about 100 children are kidnapped and killed each year in the United States, down from the estimated 200 to 300 cases in the 1980s, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
In the face of such numbers, parents are left in a wilderness, without much to guide them. How can they talk to their children without robbing them of their innocence?
It's a delicate balance, says Ben Stephens, a Clemson University psychology professor.
Parents must try to tailor their discussions to each child, he says. Children handle such information differently.
"What might work with one kid might not work with another," Stephens says.
Also, parents should try to avoid talking about the "gory details of why" kids need be aware of their surroundings. Rather, parents should simply impose rules and enforce them consistently, he says.
Chapman, the Gilder Creek Farm mom, says neighbors must learn from this and change attitudes and preconceptions.
"It's not me watching out for my children and you watching out for your children," she says. "It's everybody watching out for all children. Whether you have a child or not, they're still children of your community. That's the important thing that needs to get through."
